This liger cub and other hybrid animals were thought to be biological rarities, but recent studies have revealed cross-species animals are more common than once thought.
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The whale’s teeth were what had caught molecular ecologist Eline Lorenzen’s attention. Of the 18 chompers lining the front of the skull’s mouth, some were twisted, not unlike a narwhal’s tusk. But the 30-year-old specimen, hidden away in the basement of the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen, didn’t have a tusk at all. When Lorenzen became director of the museum in 2015, she decided to examine the skull more closely. Working with a team of collaborators, she extracted genetic material and compared it with DNA from the teeth of narwhal and beluga specimens in the museum. The skull, it turned out, was the first-ever confirmed narluga, the son of a beluga dad and a narwhal ...
